Nigel Wrench | |
|---|---|
| Born | Stephen Wrench |
| Occupation(s) | Radio presenter, Reporter |
| Known for | Interviewing Winnie Mandela and Banksy; HIV activism |
Stephen Wrench, known professionally as Nigel Wrench, is the only journalist known to have interviewed both the artist known as Banksy and the South African activist Winnie Mandela. Wrench is a British radio presenter and reporter. In the 1980s, he reported extensively from South Africa, and later in London enjoyed a successful 20-year career with the BBC, continuing his journalistic work despite a close brush with death from AIDS-related illness.
Wrench's first radio job was with Capital Radio 604, which provided the first independent source of broadcast news in South Africa.
At Turnstyle News, an independent Johannesburg-based radio news agency, Wrench reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the UK-based Independent Radio News and London Broadcasting Company.
In December 1985, he was among those detained briefly by police when reporting the illegal return of Winnie Mandela to Soweto. [1]
Reporting on demonstrations in Windhoek, Namibia, in September 1988, he was among those beaten up by police. [2]
Wrench was also a pop music columnist for the Mail & Guardian [3] and reported on Johannesburg's thriving underground nightlife.
In 1989 Wrench joined the BBC as a London-based reporter for the Today programme. In 1990, he was among the reporters at the prison gates when Nelson Mandela walked free. [4] Wrench reported from a wide variety of other locations for BBC Radio including Jerusalem, St Petersburg, Bucharest, Kyiv and Bosnia.
Wrench was a founding co-host of Out This Week , an LGBT+ news programme on BBC Radio 5 Live for which he won a Sony Radio Award. He later won a New York Radio Award for his 1998 Radio 4 documentary Aids and Me, [5] while also regularly co-presenting the Radio 4 programme PM . [6] Wrench's spell as culture reporter for PM , saw him interviewing leading artists, performers, playwrights and novelists as well as reporting regularly from the Edinburgh Festival. [7]
Wrench interviewed Banksy on PM at the opening of "Turf War", the first Banksy exhibition in London in 2003. [8]
Among Wrench's many radio documentaries was a major BBC World Service series Pills, Patients and Profits [9] which examined the global pharmaceutical industry.
In February 2015 Wrench released ZA86, [10] a limited-edition cassette, through specialist label The Tapeworm. [11] A sleeve note describes it as: "apartheid South Africa, 1986, through the headphones of a young radio reporter". [12] A review in The Quietus took the opportunity to sum up his career: "Few journalists have quite so intimately captured the essence of their era's great moral panics as Nigel Wrench". [13]
Wrench's second cassette for Tapeworm, ZA87, [14] a piece of audio verité documenting a political funeral in Soweto in 1987, was released in March 2021.
Wrench was for many years a voluntary director of Duckie Ltd, the award-winning LGBT+ performance group. [15]
Nigel Wrench now uses the name he was born with, Stephen Wrench, and has contributed, among others, an interview with Lloyd Russell-Moyle for Brighton's Gscene magazine. [16]
In April 2022, Wrench released a field recording called /Disco/Football recorded at non league alt-football outfit Whitehawk FC.
"Switch Off That Machine",released in May 2025, is a third collection of archive recordings intended, a sleeve note says, as “a warning for the present and the future, from the past of apartheid South Africa", digitally free on Bandcamp [17] and as a limited edition compact disc. Bandcamp rated "Switch Off That Machine" as one of 'The Best Field Recordings of May 2025' [18] .
In November 2023, Wrench's full interview with Banksy was released by the BBC [19] in which Banksy reveals his first name as "Robbie", [20] in a podcast [21] which attracted worldwide attention. [22] [23] [24]
Wrench came out as HIV-positive in 1994, in a speech while accepting his Sony Radio Award. [25] He wrote extensively about living with HIV and AIDS, including a regular column for the Pink Paper [26] and made a television documentary called From Russia With Love for BBC3 in 2003. [27] He remains the only broadcaster with a declared AIDS diagnosis to broadcast a live BBC Radio programme, after he returned from a brush with death from PCP, an AIDS-related pneumonia, to work behind the microphone at the PM programme in 1996. [28] Later, Wrench wrote of being a long-term survivor of AIDS [29] for Brighton's Scene magazine in November 2021, saying "there are costs to this survival. There are the side effects of both medication and HIV itself, usually with long names: peripheral neuropathy causing constant pins and needles in hands and feet; lipodystrophy, which means I'm a really weird shape and pancreatic insufficiency which requires a handful of pills to digest food". [30] In May 2025, Wrench released a third collection of archive recordings, ’Switch Off That Machine', available digitally free on Bandcamp [31] and to buy as a limited edition compact disc. Bandcamp rated it as one of 'The Best Field Recordings of May 2025' [32] .
Wrench now lives in Brighton where, along with being a fan of non-league Whitehawk FC [33] as one of the non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic Hawks Ultras, [34] he is also a volunteer shepherd. [35]